So this came up on social media. Someone had been playing with some sample raw footage provided by a camera manufacturer and he/she was concerned because he felt that this manufacturer supplied footage graded much better than his/her own Sony XAVC-I footage.
There is a lot to a situation like this, but very often the issue isn’t that the other footage was raw while his/her own footage was XAVC-I S-Log. Raw doesn’t normally have more colour or more DR than log. The colour range and the shadow range won’t be significantly different as that tends to be limited by the cameras sensor rather than the recording codec. But what you might have if the raw is 12 bit or greater is a larger bit depth or less compression. Perhaps a bit of both and that can sometimes give some extra precision or finer gradations as well as a bit less noise (although compression can reduce noise). This may come into play when you really start to push and pull the footage very hard in the grade, but generally, if you can’t get the image you want out of 10 bit XAVC-I, 12 bit raw isn’t going to help you. Raw might make it a bit quicker to get to where you want to be and I do love working with the 16 bit X-OCN (raw) from Venice and Burano, but I have never really felt that XAVC S-Log3 is lacking. Even a deeper bit depth might not be all it seems. The sensors in most video cameras under $20K only have 12 bit analog to digital converters and that tends to be the main image quality bottleneck (and this where Venice really shines with its 14 bit A2D).
Sony’s XAVC-I S-log3 grades really well, really, really well. A big issue however is the reliance on LUTs. 3D LUTs divide the image up into 33x or 65x adjustment bands and then it is down to the grading software to interpolate between each band. This can introduce artefacts into the image.
Some people simply skip doing a proper colourspace transform altogether and this may introduce twists into the gamma and colourspace which then makes it hard to get the colours or contrast they really want as it can be hard to bend the colours in a pleasing way without them going “weird”.
Colour managed workflows help to maintain the full range of the original content within the correct output colourspace without any unwanted twists and are often the best way to full realise the potential of the content you have shot.
Plus not all grading software is created equal. I was an Adobe Premiere user for years until I needed to do a lot more grading. When DaVinci Resolve became affordable I switched to Resolve for grading and have never looked back – after all it is a proper grading tool, not edit software with a bunch of plugins bolted on.
But as always the real key is how it was shot. Manufacturer supplied sample content is likely to have been shot very well and highly optimised, after all they want it to make their camera look as good as possible. When comparing footage from different sources you really do need to consider whether just how well it was shot. Was the most appropriate exposure index used for the type of scene. Was it shot at the best possible time of day for the best sun positioning. How much attention went in to things like the careful choice of the colours in the scene to provide pleasing colour contrast. How much time was spent with negative fill to bring down the shadow areas etc, what filtration was used to bleed off highlights or polarise the sky or windows. What lenses were used. All these things will have a massive impact on how gradeable the footage will be.
I’ve added a new LUT for S-Log3 and SGamut3.cine to my free LUT collection. The new LUT is called Elixir and is the first LUT from a collection of 3 new LUTs with similar contrast and brightness but quite different colours that I will be releasing between now and the end of the year. Elixir is designed for short film projects and drama to provide rich colours with pleasing skin tones. Blues are shifted slightly teal, but there is no distracting colour cast, just pleasing colours with mid to high contrast. The LUT can be used with any Sony camera that has S-Log3 and SGamut3.cine, so that includes the whole of the Cinema Line including the FX6, FX3 and FX30 as well as cameras like the FS5 and FS7. For more information and to download this or any of my free LUTs please go to the LUT page: https://www.xdcam-user.com/picture-settings-and-luts/alisters-free-luts/
“Color Science” is one of those currently in fashion phrases that gets thrown around all over the place today. First of all – what the heck is color science anyway? Simply put it’s how the camera sees the colors in a scene, mixes them together, records them – and then how your editing or grading software interprets what is in the recording and finally how the TV or other display device turns the digital values it receives back into a color image. It’s a combination of optical filters such as the low pass filter, color filters, sensor properties, how the sensor is read out and how the signals are electronically processed both in the camera, by your edit/grading system and by the display device. It is no one single thing, and it’s important to understand that your edit process also contributes to the overall color science.
Color Science is something we have been doing since the very first color cameras, it’s not anything new. However us end users now have a much greater ability to modify that color science thanks to better post production tools and in camera adjustments such as picture profiles or scene files.
Recently, Sony cameras have sometimes been seen by some as having less advanced or poor color science compared to cameras from some other manufacturers. Is this really the case? For Sony part of the color science issue is that historically Sony have deliberately designed their newest cameras to match previous generations of cameras so that a large organisation with multiple cameras can use new cameras without having them look radically different to their old ones. It has always been like this and all the manufacturers do this, Panasonic cameras have a certain look as do Canon etc. New and old Panasonics tend to look the same as do old and new Canon’s, but the Canon’s look different to the Panasonics which look different to the Sony’s.
Sony have a very long heritage in broadcast TV and that’s how their cameras look out of the box, like Rec-709 TV cameras with colors that are similar to the tube cameras they were producing 20 years ago. Sony’s broadcast color science is really very accurate – point one at a test chart such as a Chroma DuMonde and you’ll see highly repeatable, consistent and accurate color reproduction with all the vectors on a vector scope falling exactly where they should, including the skin tone line.
On the one hand this is great if you are that big multi-camera business wanting to add new cameras to old ones without problems, where you want your latest ENG or self-shooters cameras to have the same colors as your perhaps older studio cameras so that any video inserts into a studio show cut in and out smoothly with a consistent look.
But on the other hand it’s not so good if you are a one man band shooter that wants something that looks different. Plus accurate is not always “pretty” and you can’t get away from the fact that the pictures look like Rec-709 television pictures in a new world of digital cinematography where TV is perhaps seen as bad and the holy grail is now a very different kind of look that is more stylised and much less true to life.
So Sony have been a bit stuck. The standard look you get when you apply any of the standard off-the shelf S-Log3 or S-Log2 LUT’s will by design be based on the Sony color science of old, so you get the Sony look. Most edit and grading applications are using transforms for S-Log2/3 based on Sony’s old standard Rec-709 look to maintain this consistency of look. This isn’t a mistake. It’s by design, it’s a Sony camera so it’s supposed to look like other Sony cameras, not different.
But for many this isn’t what they want. They want a camera that looks different, perhaps the “film look” – whatever that is?
Recently we have seen two new cameras from Sony that out of the box look very different from all the others. Sony’s high end Venice camera and the lower cost FS5 MKII. The FS5 MKII in particular proves that it’s possible to have a very different look with Sony’s existing colour filters and sensors. The FS5 MK II has exactly the same sensor with exactly the same electronics as the MK I. The only difference is in the way the RGB data from the sensor is being processed and mixed together (determined by the different firmware in the Mk1 and mk2) to create the final output.
The sensors Sony manufacture and use are very good at capturing color. Sony sensors are found in cameras from many different manufacturers. The recording systems in the Sony cameras do a fine job of recording those colors as data within the files the camera records as data with different code values representing what the sensor saw. Take that data into almost any half decent grading software and you can change the way it looks by modifying the data values. In post production I can turn almost any color I want into any other color. It’s really up to us as to how we translate the code values in the files into the colors we see on the screen, especially when recording using Log or raw. A 3D LUT can change tones and hues very easily by shifting and modifying the code values. So really there is no reason why you have to have the Sony 709 look.
My Venice emulation LUT’s will make S-Log3 from an FS5 or FS7 look quite different to the old Sony Broadcast look. I also have LUT’s for Sony cameras that emulate different Fuji and Kodak film stocks, apply one of these and it really looks nothing like a Sony broadcast camera. Another alternative is to use a color managed workflow such as ACES which will attempt to make just about every camera on the market look the same applying the ACES film style look and highlight roll-off.
We have seen it time and time again where Sony footage has been graded well and it then becomes all but impossible to identify what camera shot it. If you have Netflix take a look at “The Crown” shot on Sony’s F55 (which has the same default Sony look as the FS5 MK1, FS7 etc). Most people find it hard to believe the Crown was shot with a Sony because it has not even the slightest hint of the old Sony broadcast look.
If you use default settings, standard LUT’s etc it will look like a Sony, it’s supposed to! But you have the freedom to choose from a vast range of alternative looks or better still create your own looks and styles with your own grading choices.
But for many this can prove tricky as often they will start with a standard Sony LUT or standard Sony transform. So the image they start with has the old Sony look. When you start to grade or adjust this it can sometimes look wrong because you have perhaps become used to the original Sony image and then anything else just doesn’t seem right, because it’s not what you are used to. In addition if you add a LUT and then grade, elements of the LUT’s look may be hard to remove, things like the highlight roll off will be hard baked into the material, so you need to do need to think carefully about how you use LUT’s. So try to break away from standard LUT’s. Try ACES or try some other starting point for your grade.
Going forward I think it is likely that we will see the new Venice look become standard across all of the Cinema style cameras from Sony, but it will take time for this to trickle down into all the grading and editing software that currently uses transforms for s-Log2/3 that are based on the old Sony Rec-709 broadcast look. But if you grade your footage for yourself you can create just about any look you want.
Every now and again I get asked how to adjust the color matrix in a video camera. Back in 2009 I made a video on how to adjust the color matrix in the Sony’s EX series of cameras. This video is just as relevant today as it was then. The basic principles have not changed.
The exact menu settings and menu layout may be a little different in the latest cameras, but the adjustment of the matrix setting (R-G, G-R etc) have exactly the same effect in the latest camera that provide matrix adjustments (FS7, F5, F55 and most of the shoulder mount and other broadcast cameras). So if you want a better understanding of how these settings and adjustment works, take a look at the video.
I’ll warn you now that adjusting the color matrix is not easy as each setting interacts with the others. So creating a specific look via the matrix is not easy and requires a fair bit of patience and a lot of fiddling and testing to get it just right.
Please don’t take this post the wrong way. I DO understand why some people like to try and emulate film. I understand that film has a “look”. I also understand that for many people that look is the holy grail of film production. I’m simply looking at why we do this and am throwing the big question out there which is “is it the right thing to do”? I welcome your comments on this subject as it’s an interesting one worthy of discussion.
In recent years with the explosion of large sensor cameras with great dynamic range it has become a very common practice to take the images these cameras capture and apply a grade or LUT that mimics the look of many of todays major movies. This is often simply referred to as the “film look”.
This look seems to be becoming more and more extreme as creators attempt to make their film more film like than the one before, leading to a situation where the look becomes very distinct as opposed to just a trait of the capture medium. A common technique is the “teal and orange” look where the overall image is tinted teal and then skin tones and other similar tones are made slightly orange. This is done to create colour contrast between the faces of the cast and the background as teal and orange are on opposite sites of the colour wheel.
Another variation of the “film look” is the flat look. I don’t really know where this look came from as it’s not really very film like at all. It probably comes from shooting with a log gamma curve, which results in a flat, washed out looking image when viewed on a conventional monitor. Then because this look is “cool” because shooting on log is “cool” much of the flatness is left in the image in the grade because it looks different to regular TV ( or it may simply be that it’s easier to create a flat look than a good looking high contrast look). Later in the article I have a nice comparison of these two types of “film look”.
Not Like TV!
Not looking like TV or Video may be one of the biggest drivers for the “film look”. We watch TV day in, day out. Well produced TV will have accurate colours, natural contrast (over a limited range at least) and if the TV is set up correctly should be pretty true to life. Of course there are exceptions to this like many daytime TV or game shows where the saturation and brightness is cranked up to make the programmes vibrant and vivid. But the aim of most TV shows is to look true to life. Perhaps this is one of the drivers to make films look different, so that they are not true to life, more like a slightly abstract painting or other work of art. Colour and contrast can help setup different moods, dull and grey for sadness, bright and colourful for happy scenes etc, but this should be separate from the overall look applied to a film.
Another aspect of the TV look comes from the fact that most TV viewing takes place in a normal room where light levels are not controlled. As a result bright pictures are normally needed, especially for daytime TV shows.
But What Does Film Look Like?
But what does film look like? As some of you will know I travel a lot and spend a lot of time on airplanes. I like to watch a film or 2 on longer flights and recently I’ve been watching some older films that were shot on film and probably didn’t have any of the grading or other extensive manipulation processes that most modern movies go through.
Lets look at a few frames from some of those movies, shot on film and see what they look like.
Lawrence of Arabia.
The all time classic Lawrence of Arabia. This film is surprisingly colourful. Red, blues, yellows are all well saturated. The film is high contrast. That is, it has very dark blacks, not crushed, but deep and full of subtle textures. Skin tones are around 55 IRE and perhaps very slightly skewed towards brown/red, but then the cast are all rather sun tanned. But I wouldn’t call the skin tones orange. Diffuse whites typically around 80 IRE and they are white, not tinted or coloured.
Braveheart.
When I watched Braveheart, one of the things that stood out to me was how green the foliage and grass was. The strong greens really stood out in this movie compared to more modern films. Overall it’s quite dark, skin tones are often around 45 IRE and rarely more than 55 IRE, very slightly warm/brown looking, but not orange. Again it’s well saturated and high contrast with deep blacks. Overall most scenes have a quite low peak and average brightness level. It’s quite hard to watch this film in a bright room on a conventional TV, but it looks fantastic in a darkened room.
Raiders Of The Lost Ark
Raiders of the Lost Ark does show some of the attributes often used for the modern film look. Skin tones are warm and have a slight orange tint and overall the movie is very warm looking. A lot of the sets use warm colours with browns and reds being prominent. Colours are well saturated. Again we have high contrast with deep blacks and those much lower than TV skin tones, typically 50-55IRE in Raiders. Look at the foliage and plants though, they are close to what you might call TV greens, ie realistic shades of green.
A key thing I noticed in all of these (and other) older movies is that overall the images are darker than we would use for daytime TV. Skin tones in movies seem to sit around 55IRE. Compare that to the typical use of 70% zebras for faces on TV. Also whites are generally lower, often diffuse white sitting at around 75-80%. One important consideration is that films are designed to be shown in dark cinema theatres where white at 75% looks pretty bright. Compare that to watching TV in a bright living room where to make white look bright you need it as bright as you can get. Having diffuse whites that bit lower in the display range leaves a little more room to separate highlights from whites giving the impression of a greater dynamic range. It also brings the mid range down a bit so the shadows also look darker without having to crush them.
Side Note: When using Sony’s Hypergammas and Cingeammas they are supposed to be exposed so that white is around 70-75% with skin tones around 55-60%. If used like this with a sutable colour matrix such as “cinema” they can look quite film like.
If we look at some recent movies the look can be very different.
The Revenant
The Revenant is a gritty film and it has a gritty look. But compare it to Braveheart and it’s very different. We have the same much lower skin tone and diffuse white levels, but where has the green gone? and the sky is very pale. The sky and trees are all tinted slightly towards teal and de-saturated. Overall there is only a very small colour range in the movie. Nothing like the 70mm film of Laurence of Arabia or the 35mm film of Braveheart.
Dead Men Tell No Tales.
In the latest instalment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise the images are very “brown”. Notice how even the whites of the ladies dresses or soldiers uniforms are slightly brown. The sky is slightly grey (I’m sure the sky was much bluer than this). The palm tree fronds look browner than green and Jack Sparrow looks like he’s been using too much fake tan as his face is border line orange (and almost always also quite dark).
Wonder Woman.
Wonder woman is another very brown movie. In this frame we can see that the sky is quite brown. Meanwhile the grass is pushed towards teal and de-saturated, it certainly isn’t the colour of real grass. Overall colours are subdued with the exception of skin tones.
These are fairly typical of most modern movies. Colours generally quite subdued, especially greens and blues. The sky is rarely a vibrant blue, grass is rarely a grassy green. Skin tones tend to be very slightly orange and around 50-60IRE. Blacks are almost always deep and the images contrasty. Whites are rarely actually white, they tend to be tinted either slightly brown or slightly teal. Steel blues and warm browns are favoured hues. These are very different looking images to the movies shot on film that didn’t go through extensive post production manipulation.
So the film look, isn’t really about making it look like it was shot on film, it’s a stylised look that has become stronger and stronger in recent years with most movies having elements of this look. So in creating the “film look” we are not really mimicking film, but copying a now almost standard colour grading recipe that has some film style traits.
BUT IS IT A GOOD THING?
In most cases these are not unpleasant looks and for some productions the look can add to the film, although sometimes it can be taken to noticeable and objectionable extremes. However we do now have cameras that can capture huge colour ranges. We also have the display technologies to show these enormous colour ranges. Yet we often choose to deliberately limit what we use and very often distort the colours in our quest for the “film look”.
HDR TV’s with Rec2020 colour can show both a greater dynamic range and a greater colour range than we have ever seen before. Yet we are not making use of this range, in particular the colour range except in some special cases like some TV commercials as well as high end wild life films such as Planet Earth II.
This TV commercial for TUI has some wonderful vibrant colours that are not restricted to just browns and teal yet it looks very film like. It does have an overall warm tint, but the other colours are allowed to punch through. It feels like the big budget production that it clearly was without having to resort to the modern defacto restrictive film look colour palette. Why can’t feature films look like this? Why do they need to be dull with a limited colour range? Why do we strive to deliberately restrict our colour pallet in the name of fashion?
What’s even more interesting is what was done for the behind the scenes film for the TUI advert…..
The producers of the BTS film decided to go with an extremely flat, washed out look, another form of modern “film look” that really couldn’t be further from film. When an typical viewer watches this do they get it in the same way as we that work in the industry do? Do they understand the significance of the washed out, flat, low contrast pictures or do they just see weird looking milky pictures that lack colour with odd skin tones? The BTS film just looks wrong to me. It looks like it was shot with log and not graded. Personally, I don’t think it looks cool or stylish, it just looks wrong and cheap compared to the lush imagery in the actual advert (perhaps that was the intention).
I often see people looking for a film look LUT. Often they want to mimic a particular film. That’s fine, it’s up to them. But if everyone starts to home in on one particular look or style then the films we watch will all look the same. That’s not what I want. I want lush rich colours where appropriate. Then I might want to see a subdued look in a period piece or a vivid look for a 70’s film. Within the same movie colour can be used to differentiate between different parts of the story. Take Woody Allen’s Cafe Society, shot by Vittorio Storaro for example. The New York scenes are grey and moody while the scenes in LA that portray a fresh start are vibrant and vivid. This is I believe important, to use colour and contrast to help tell the story.
Our modern cameras give us an amazing palette to work with. We have the tools such as DaVinci Resolve to manipulate those colours with relative ease. I believe we should be more adventurous with our use of colour. Reducing exposure levels a little compared to the nominal TV and video – skin tones at 70% – diffuse whites at 85-90%, helps replicate the film look and also leaves a bit more space in the highlight range to separate highlights from whites which really helps give the impression of a more contrasty image. Blacks should be black, not washed out and they shouldn’t be crushed either.
Above all else learn to create different styles. Don’t be afraid of using colour to tell your story and remember that real film isn’t just brown and teal, it’s actually quite colourful. Great artists tend to stand out when their works are different, not when they are the same as everyone else.
So… you want to change the look of the colour in your pictures but are not sure how to do it. One of the first things that you need to understand is the relationship between white balance and the colour matrix. They are two very different things, with two different jobs. As it’s name applies white balance is designed to ensure that whites with the image are white, even when shooting under lighting of different colour temperatures. When you shoot indoors under tungsten lights (you know, the one the EU have decided you can no longer buy) the light is very orange. When you shoot outside under sunlight the light is very blue. Our eyes adjust for this very well, so we barely notice the difference, but an electronic video camera is very sensitive to these changes. When you point a video camera at a white or grey card and do a manual white balance, what happens is that the camera adjusts the gain of the red, blue and green channels to minimise the amount of colour in areas of white (or grey) so that they do in fact appear white, ie with no colour. So the important thing to remember is that white balance is trying to eliminate colour in whites and greys.
The Matrix however deals purely with saturated parts of the image or areas where there is colour. It works be defining the ratio of how each colour is mixed with it’s complimentary colours. So changing the white balance does not alter the matrix and changing the matrix does not alter the white balance (whites will still be white). What changing the matrix will do is change the hue of the image, so you could make greens look bluer for example or reds more green.
So if you want to make your pictures look warmer (more orange or red) overall, then you would do this by offsetting the white balance, as in a warm picture your whites would appear warmer if they are slightly orange. This could be done electronically by adding an offset to the colour temperature settings or by using a warming card, which is a very slightly blue card. If you want to make the reds richer in your pictures then you would use the matrix as this allows you to make the reds stronger relative to the other colours, while whites stay white.
The PDW-700 cameras are balanced for daylight optically and then corrected electronically for tungsten etc.
Traditionally cameras were balanced for Tungsten and then added colour correction optical filters to get to daylight. This was done as CC filters absorb light and thus make the camera less sensitive. Normally when shooting outdoors in daylight sensitivity is not an issue while shooting indoors under tungsten light you used to need every bit of sensitivity you could get.
The down side to this approach is that tungsten contains very little blue light so to get a natural picture the blue channel was often running at quite a high level of gain which increases noise in the blue channel and thus overall noise. In addition when you rotated in the CC filters to get to daylight the sensitivity of the camera was reduced, so you did not have constant gain.
With the PDW-700 (and also the F350 I believe) the cameras are essentially balanced for daylight, without the use of any CC filters, which helps reduce noise in the blue channel. Then for tungsten shooting you electronically re balance the camera. By doing this the overall sensitivity of the camera is constant whether shooting at 3.2K or 5.6K and you only get additional blue channel noise while shooting under tungsten. If you are worried by blue channel noise you can always correct from daylight down to tungsten with an optical CC filter (80A) and leave the camera set to daylight, although this will reduce the systems overall sensitivity by around 1 and a half stops.
I got given the link to a video on the RedGiant site (thanks Paul) that gives a really interesting insight into how the grading in blockbuster movies is done. The nice thing about the video is that it explains why certain things and certain colours are used. It’s a really insightful video.
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